This book is more irreverent and more subversive than Mark Twain. And it is very funny and an entertaining read. It's especially good if you happen to be feeling annoyed at your parents.
He said: "Oh, don't talk about rewards. Look at Milton, who only got â5 for 'Paradise Lost.' "And a great deal too much," I rejoined promptly. "I would have given him twice as much myself not to have written it at all."
Surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it- and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow. He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.
Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it; when you find that you have occasion for this or that knowledge, or foresee that you will have occasion for it shortly, the sooner you learn it the better, but till then spend your time in growing bone and muscle; these will be much more useful to you than Latin and Greek, nor will you ever be able to make them if you do not do so now, whereas Latin and Greek can be acquired at any time by those who want them.
Nothing is well done nor worth doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily.
Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he has wisely refrained from saying whether they are good things or bad things. It might perhaps be as well if the world were to dream of, or even become wide awake to, some of the things that are being wrought by prayer.
And, best of all:
[Mendelssohn] wrote "I then went to the Tribune [a room in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence]. This room is so delightfully small you can traverse it in fifteen paces, yet it contains a world of art. I again sought out my favourite arm chair which stands under the statue of the 'Slave whetting his knife' (L'Arrotino), and taking possession of it I enjoyed myself for a couple of hours..." I wonder how many chalks Mendelssohn gave himself for having sat two hours on that chair. I wonder how often he looked at his watch to see if his two hours were up. I wonder how often he told himself that he was quite as big a gun, if the truth were known, as any of the men whose works he saw before him, how often he wondered whether any of the visitors were recognizing him and admiring him for sitting such a long time in the same chair, and how often he was vexed at seeing them pass him by and take no notice of him. But perhaps if the truth were known his two hours was not quite two hours.
I worked for over a decade at a midsized company, founded in the late sixties, whose business was the manufacture of $30,000-$100,000 high-tech products. The development process included internal firmware, quite a lot of interesting and non-obvious mechanical and optical engineering, and driver software.
To say they were casual about intellectual property was putting it mildly. The mindset seemed to be, basically, that they copied good ideas from the competition and expected the competition to copy ideas from them. (I do mean IDEAS though, nothing more). They felt their business success depended on getting needed products to market in a timely way, and that it was all about good execution of ideas, not exclusive possession of ideas.
All of us software people put copyright notices on our code because we just thought it was good practice, but nobody told us to do so or send out memos on how to do it or monitored us to make sure we were doing it right.
I created a mini dust-up once when the head of marketing told me to send the complete source code to one of our software drivers to another company--a 200-age listing--and I said sure, but that I wouldn't do it without written directions from an officer of the company. He was furious that I would even question his directions and insisting that it was inappropriate for me to demur because it was no big deal, and I replied, sincerely, that I didn't think it was a big deal, either--in context it really wasn't--but that nevertheless I thought I needed to have that level of authorization, and that since it wasn't a big deal it shouldn't be hard to get it. It's not that he was being a PHB, either--the point is that nobody in the company quite got it that maybe you didn't just send out half a pound of listing on a casual say-so.
For a while, there was one mid-level manager who liked patents and embarked on a semi-systematic effort to get things patented, and recognize engineers by posting framed notices about the patents that they had gotten--there were maybe about ten such frames on the wall by the time he left. But it was not part of the corporate culture.
I don't remember ever hearing about the company suing or being sued over a patent except for one case, where it was embroiled as a party in a lawsuit involving some software components they had purchased and licensed from another firm.
...the kind that starts out regarded by the established players as almost a joke, who ignore it because its not what the important customers are asking for, just some bargain-hunting fools... then the low-end, joke product develops its own specialized market, gradually improves, starts eating the lunch of the big guys, and somehow they fade away.
The Ford Model Twas regarded as such a piece of junk the "Ford joke" became a genre in itself, and people published entire BOOKS of nothing but Ford jokes. "Does your Ford make a racket?" "Oh, no, only when it's running" etc.
The story stays Zavvi says "We have tried to contact you on numerous occasions to give you the opportunity to return this item to us (at our cost and no inconvenience to yourself)."
So let's use some common sense here. Assuming they were telling the truth... if a company called me and explained the error, apologized, issued no threats, but ASKED me to send it back, offered to send me a prepaid return sticker, and offered to schedule a pickup if I didn't want to take it to a dropbox, I wouldn't fuss. To me, it would all be about the amount of work I'd have to do to return it. Make it easy for me to do, sure I'd do it.
The legal threats are stupid. Their percentage of returns acting nice will be as large or larger as the results of acting nasty. And if they take legal action they'll not only occur expenses, they'll turn every one of those customers into enthusiastic broadcasters of ill-will.
At one now-defunct Fortune 500 company I worked for, they were sort of reluctant to apply any informal techniques like watching users try to use software (without instructions or coaching), because they had a nascent Human Factors group that wanted to build a facility with one-way mirrors and video cameras, and they kept telling everyone that you needed to have a facility like that in order to learn anything.
On numerous occasions at numerous companies I've simply corralled someone, anyone, who had not yet used the software, and asked them to try to accomplish basic tasks with it. "Please forgive me for not helping, I just want to see how far you can get without help. I'll help you if you really get stuck." And then I've watched them as they tried to use my software.
I always learned a lot from this, and I learned it very quickly, and a lot of what I learned was really trivially easy to implement. You can so easily miss the blindingly obvious when you are familiar with the software yourself.
The worst advice--well, maybe not the worst, but bad advice--tended to come from people giving advice that they imagined was on someone else's behalf. You really do NOT know what things people are going to find easy or difficult until you actually watch them try.
Vanguely reminiscent of Titanic's "watertight" compartments, which were watertight at the SIDES, but open at the TOP. I believe it was "unsinkable" in some technical understanding of the word. That is, a localized hull breach that filled only one compartment would not have sunk the ship. But water could spill from one compartment to another when the ship was tilted, and thus the entry of water was not confined to the compartments where the leak was. Or something like that...
And whose fault would that be, exactly? For five months, Surface MEANT "Surface RT." Did someone hold a gun to Microsoft's head and say "Release Surface RT first?" Did someone hold a gun to Microsoft's head and say "Do Surface RT in the first place?"
Remember that portability was supposed to be one of the primary design goals for Windows NT, and it originally ran on, IIRC, Digital Alpha, IBM PowerPC, SPARC promised (but never delivered), etc. etc. If they'd stuck to their design goals, every Windows application could have been offered for Windows RT. Did someone hold a gun to their head and say "Forget portability, break your promises, ditch every platform but Intel?"
And then, having deliberately burned their bridges to everything but Intel, did someone hold a gun to their heads and say "Now release a product that isn't viable now that those bridges are burned?"
The yellow color was intended to evoke Mongolia--racism in the most literal sense--because Mongolia was the site then famous as the site where a lode of the highest-quality graphite had been discovered.
So yellow pencils could not have been patented--I hope--but whoever made them first might very well have had a legitimate claim to trademark protection as "trade dress."
...because of surface-to-volume and scaling considerations, the smaller these things get, the less fragile they get. I dropped my iPod Mini (rotating drive) at least as often as I dropped my current flash-memory iPod and never had a problem. Yes, battery life is an issue. Quite possibly, service life might be an issue (bearing wear).
Seagate is claiming 400 Gs maximum operating shock. I, um, gee, well truthfully I have no idea what that means in practical terms but it seems like a big number to me. They are claiming 80 Gs for the first desktop drive I looked at.
Amusing, of course, but irrelevant, because DRM isn't about piracy, and it certainly isn't about rewarding content creators, it's about preventing competition.
As long as you can't read an Amazon Kindle on a Nook, DRM is doing its job. If Nooks and Barnes and Noble are getting driven out of business, DRM is doing its job well.
An automated eBook scanner doesn't do anything to make the eBook business more competitive.
It all may be so, but nevertheless Google is an awful lot closer to Isaac Asimov's Multivac than I ever expected to see in my lifetime.
In the 1960s, when I would tell people that I was working with computers, a very common response is "What does that mean? Do you ask it questions?" At the time, I always thought it was a laughably naÃve question.
Google DOESN'T understand English, and that it takes a lot of lateral-thinking and adventure-game knowhow to formulate a question well. (For example: if you want the text of a poem or a song lyric, don't search on the title or the first line, search on the most obscure line or phrase from the poem you can think of because that's what's most likely to get you the full text).
Nevertheless, I just used Google to find me the ext of Isaac Asimov's The FInal Question.
After saying how much they respected and admired the Globe, the New York Times made it clear that they regarded Boston as the sticks and just wanted to milk the cash cow.
I was a subscriber for decades and might still be if they had basically not driven me away.
They gradually cut out all my favorite columnists and started to use wire services for national stories they would once have covered themselves.
Royal Ford, their auto writer, always talked about things like how the tested car did during a snowy ski trip to New Hampshire. So one day I open the paper to find that he's been replaced by a syndicated column written by someone in California.
The last straw was billing. They screwed up the billing. We were on quarterly billing, and when the New York Times took over, we continued to receive quarterly bills--but EVERY bill we got was accompanied with a 90-day late notice and threats to send it to collection.
We got that straightened out--went to automatic monthly payments by credit card--and THEN someone at the Globe decided it would be cool to wrap all of their newspaper bundles in computer printouts of customer credit card information.
My wife says to me, "Well, I hate the work of mailing a check every month, but should we do that?" And I say "Honey, didn't you read the rest of the story? They wrapped the Globe in credit card printouts, but they were wrapping the Worcester Telegram in customer checking account information printouts!
What can you say to a company that does a thing like that? Except "goodbye."
...due to screen sizing problems. The typical problem is that the font size and touch-sensitive areas are far too small, and don't respond to the "pinch" gesture.
In almost ALL applications, text entry of more than a word or phrase is close to unusable the text-selection cursors are too small to manipulate accurately; if you don't type it perfectly the first time, seeing and backspacing every error as you type it, your ability to make a correction in the middle of a block of text is close to nil.
If you read app reviews, you'll see that maybe 1/4 of all hidden-picture-adventure type games will be reported as unusable because something about the fit of the game to the physical screen ends up a required object, needed for future progress, unselectable.
So maybe the Android environment has solutions to all such problems, but on the evidence of actual applications, a LOT of developers either don't know the solutions or don't care about the user experience.
PBS at least shows that they care about the user experience.
No, the outrage is about what they were hired to do. Things can be legal, yet objectionable or unethical or deceptive. Talking on a cell phone in movie theatres, or paying for one newspaper in a vending box but taking five, or farting in church--are all legal as far as I know, but they are all objectionable. If someone paid people to do it, it would not be come less objectionable merely because they were being paid.
"Hollywood USED to be about making the best ART. Now, with the MBA's, it is about making short-term profit." I looked carefully to see whether you were being ironic... I don't know quite what to say! Despite "Ars Gratia Artis" on the ribbon around MGM's Leo, Hollywood has always been venal. Don't you know WHY the movie industry is centered in Hollywood?
Originally it was in New Jersey, and the Westerns, popular even then, were filmed in the Palisades. The problem was, the patent on the "Latham loop," that little loop of film that acts as a buffer between the continuously-turning reels and the intermittent claw, and a number of related patents, had been bought up by a cartel that charged fabulous amounts for properly license motion picture cameras. Many movie producers who were using unlicensed cameras fled West to be out of reach of the patent cartel's lawyers and process servers. Nothing about art there--it was all technology, intellectual property, and slightly illegal business dealings.
Then there were the years of the studio system and all sorts of complicated business linkages. The phrases "A picture and B picture" came from the studios' forcing theatres to buy pictures in bundles and pay for a lousy B picture in order to get the A pictures.
Hollywood cranked out tons and tons and tons of the most terrible schlock. Movies like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" are hommages to the Hollywood serial, but in college as a lark they showed actual serial episodes along with the movie series and they were unimaginably bad. Vast quantities of screen time were used up with non-action action, like cars slowly driving up to houses and parking and opening the car doors and getting out and walking up the walk...
Schlocky free TV killed off some of the market for schlocky movies. During the 1960s and 1970s there was a brief, slight elevation of the quality of movies with the breakup of the studio system and the rise of independent producers. But don't kid yourself. Rock Hudson trying to seduce Doris Day was not Great Art.
In 1967, following the success of "Mary Poppins," Roy Disney said that the Disney studio ought to have "at least one 'Mary Poppins' every year."
There's nothing new about the money people wishing there was a simple formula that they could get rid of all the pesky issues of creativity, talent, and the public's taste.
Any assertions that so-and-so "has been nominated for a Nobel prize" are unverifiable. Anyone can claim to have nominated anyone, but there's not way to know if they're telling the truth, because nominations can be made only by nominators invited by the Nobel committee, and the identity of the nominators and their nominations are kept secret for fifty years. See Nomination FAQ:
"Q: Has X been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize?
A: Information about the nominations, investigations, and opinions concerning the award is kept secret for fifty years.
Q: What about the rumours circling around the world about certain people being nominated for the Nobel Prize this year?
A: Well, either it's just a rumour, or someone among the invited nominators has leaked information. Since the nominations are kept secret for 50 years, you'll have to wait until then to find out."
If he didn't try it, but relied on underlings telling him that it was good, then shame on him.
If he tried it, realized how bad it was, but let it go out anyway because usability was less important than some other agenda--forcing developers into writing apps that would work on Windows Phone 8, maybe--then shame on him.
If he tried it and he thought it was good, then shame on him.
Tell me about it. I have been trying fruitlessly for over ten years to find someone capable of giving me permission to post a chapter of a 1955 novel, The Gadget Maker, by one Maxwell Griffith. It has not been reprinted since a 1956 paperback. It very obviously has no commercial value left in it. But if you happen to be an MIT alumnus, you would be fascinated to read the chapter describing the protagonist's years at MIT during the 1940s. It's a wonderful picture of a milieu--and it's not as if there were all that many novels set on the MIT campus! (The protagonist applies for admission to the aeronautical engineering program, interviews with the department head, expecting to be asked why he loves aeronautics--and finds that the department head's only real concern is to make sure that he isn't Jewish).
It's under copyright. The copyright was properly renewed in 1982. It has been a long, difficult journey--publishers basically do not take any responsibility for anything about old books, and the novel was published by Lippincott, which was taken over by medical-book publisher William & Wilkins, which acquired all Lippincott's medical books claims to have no records of Lippincott's fiction. No record at the Author's Guild, no leads through the MIT Alumni Association. Where the story stands at the moment is that I put up a sort of shout-out on my website, and Maxwell Griffith's son contacted me--and said he thought it was OK but that he needed to check with his two sisters. That was over a year ago and I've heard nothing... I've just emailed him again and perhaps there will finally be a resolution.
It's a perfect example of a cultural loss. There are thousands of books out there that are of intense interest to a few hundred people, or more, that under the old copyright laws would have been long out of copyright, but now are locked up--and you cannot find the person with the key. Thousands of books of cultural but no commercial value are being sacrificed in order to protect a tiny handful that are still worth big money.
When I was at MIT in the sixties, all undergraduates were required to take four semesters of "Humanities," in which we read chunks of Plato, the Bible, St. Augustine, Shakespeare (King Lear, I remember) and I-forget-what-all. The current requirements actually are eight semesters properly distributed in "HASS," Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and perhaps some current student will be able to say more about what that amounts to.
It wasn't a waste of time but I've never been really sure about the whole Great Books, "core" curriculum, Western canon thing. I think I learned much more about having a skeptical attitude from my science and engineering profs and from my fellow students than I did from my humanities courses. Science as taught at MIT then was not at all an authoritarian dispensation of knowledge.
The doctrine of the permanent value of certain "Great" works is sometimes called "educational perennialism," and reaches a high degree of development at St. John's College, Annapolis, where all subjects, including the sciences, are taught directly from original source texts. By all accounts it turns out well-qualified students although I'm not sure how many of them go on to engineering careers.
There is a certain arbitrary character to it. It took me a long time to figure out what the big deal about Latin and Greek was. In high school I took Latin and my understanding was that learning Latin would teach logical thought, and put me into contact with "great" works. Gradually I figured out that the reason why public high schools have Latin was that they were imitating prep schools; prep schools taught Latin because it was once an admissions requirement to Harvard; Harvard required Latin because it was imitating Oxford; Oxford required Latin because it had historic ties to the Church of England, and the Church of England was an offshoot of the Catholic-in-the-large sense church, which in turn spoke Latin (in the West) and Greek (in the East). There was also, I guess, some authentic personal enthusiasm on the part of some well-educated Brits in the 1800s for the "classics," i.e. they got a kick out of reading Horace's take on things, but I think it was mostly a cultural and historic heritage from the Church.
How many Victorian-era colleges taught Arabic so that students would be able to read al-KhwÄrizmÄ in the original, I wonder?
If you want to get technical: the language was MACRO-11. Which is an example of an assembly language. I program in "C#", not in "compiler."
In the Digital world, the name "MACRO" stuck because there were very early assemblers for the PDP-1 that did not have macro capability. So "MACRO" was the name for the assembler that did. In subsequent machine generations, "the" assembler was usually called MACRO even though as far as I know there weren't any assemblers without macro capabilities.
And perhaps I should add: the reason that it's called assembly language is because of drum memory. The usage dates back AT LEAST to the IBM 650 and Symbolic Optimal Assembly Language (SOAP). "Assembly" was short for "optimal assembly." Each instruction contained within it the address of the next instruction--they weren't sequential--and "optimal assembly" was the process of calculating how long each instruction would take so that the next instruction could be placed at the right location on the drum that it would be almost under the head when the last instruction had completed. "Optimal assembly" was the memory placement aspect of it.
The symbolic optimal assembly program added to that the advanced capability of allowing programmers to refer to instruction codes by convenient, easy-to-remember mnemonics like UFA and STA, as well as the capability of giving your very own names to instruction locations.
For some reason, the category name got abbreviated to "assembler" rather than "symbol-" um... symbolizer? Symbolic? OK, maybe THAT reason... and it stuck, even after advanced computers like the IBM 704 started to have random-access memory.
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This book is more irreverent and more subversive than Mark Twain. And it is very funny and an entertaining read. It's especially good if you happen to be feeling annoyed at your parents.
He said: "Oh, don't talk about rewards. Look at Milton, who only got â5 for 'Paradise Lost.'
"And a great deal too much," I rejoined promptly. "I would have given him twice as much myself not to have written it at all."
Surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it- and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow. He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.
Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it; when you find that you have occasion for this or that knowledge, or foresee that you will have occasion for it shortly, the sooner you learn it the better, but till then spend your time in growing bone and muscle; these will be much more useful to you than Latin and Greek, nor will you ever be able to make them if you do not do so now, whereas Latin and Greek can be acquired at any time by those who want them.
Nothing is well done nor worth doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily.
Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he has wisely refrained from saying whether they are good things or bad things. It might perhaps be as well if the world were to dream of, or even become wide awake to, some of the things that are being wrought by prayer.
And, best of all:
[Mendelssohn] wrote "I then went to the Tribune [a room in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence]. This room is so delightfully small you can traverse it in fifteen paces, yet it contains a world of art. I again sought out my favourite arm chair which stands under the statue of the 'Slave whetting his knife' (L'Arrotino), and taking possession of it I enjoyed myself for a couple of hours..." I wonder how many chalks Mendelssohn gave himself for having sat two hours on that chair. I wonder how often he looked at his watch to see if his two hours were up. I wonder how often he told himself that he was quite as big a gun, if the truth were known, as any of the men whose works he saw before him, how often he wondered whether any of the visitors were recognizing him and admiring him for sitting such a long time in the same chair, and how often he was vexed at seeing them pass him by and take no notice of him. But perhaps if the truth were known his two hours was not quite two hours.
I worked for over a decade at a midsized company, founded in the late sixties, whose business was the manufacture of $30,000-$100,000 high-tech products. The development process included internal firmware, quite a lot of interesting and non-obvious mechanical and optical engineering, and driver software.
To say they were casual about intellectual property was putting it mildly. The mindset seemed to be, basically, that they copied good ideas from the competition and expected the competition to copy ideas from them. (I do mean IDEAS though, nothing more). They felt their business success depended on getting needed products to market in a timely way, and that it was all about good execution of ideas, not exclusive possession of ideas.
All of us software people put copyright notices on our code because we just thought it was good practice, but nobody told us to do so or send out memos on how to do it or monitored us to make sure we were doing it right.
I created a mini dust-up once when the head of marketing told me to send the complete source code to one of our software drivers to another company--a 200-age listing--and I said sure, but that I wouldn't do it without written directions from an officer of the company. He was furious that I would even question his directions and insisting that it was inappropriate for me to demur because it was no big deal, and I replied, sincerely, that I didn't think it was a big deal, either--in context it really wasn't--but that nevertheless I thought I needed to have that level of authorization, and that since it wasn't a big deal it shouldn't be hard to get it. It's not that he was being a PHB, either--the point is that nobody in the company quite got it that maybe you didn't just send out half a pound of listing on a casual say-so.
For a while, there was one mid-level manager who liked patents and embarked on a semi-systematic effort to get things patented, and recognize engineers by posting framed notices about the patents that they had gotten--there were maybe about ten such frames on the wall by the time he left. But it was not part of the corporate culture.
I don't remember ever hearing about the company suing or being sued over a patent except for one case, where it was embroiled as a party in a lawsuit involving some software components they had purchased and licensed from another firm.
...the kind that starts out regarded by the established players as almost a joke, who ignore it because its not what the important customers are asking for, just some bargain-hunting fools... then the low-end, joke product develops its own specialized market, gradually improves, starts eating the lunch of the big guys, and somehow they fade away.
The Ford Model Twas regarded as such a piece of junk the "Ford joke" became a genre in itself, and people published entire BOOKS of nothing but Ford jokes. "Does your Ford make a racket?" "Oh, no, only when it's running" etc.
The story stays Zavvi says "We have tried to contact you on numerous occasions to give you the opportunity to return this item to us (at our cost and no inconvenience to yourself)."
So let's use some common sense here. Assuming they were telling the truth... if a company called me and explained the error, apologized, issued no threats, but ASKED me to send it back, offered to send me a prepaid return sticker, and offered to schedule a pickup if I didn't want to take it to a dropbox, I wouldn't fuss. To me, it would all be about the amount of work I'd have to do to return it. Make it easy for me to do, sure I'd do it.
The legal threats are stupid. Their percentage of returns acting nice will be as large or larger as the results of acting nasty. And if they take legal action they'll not only occur expenses, they'll turn every one of those customers into enthusiastic broadcasters of ill-will.
At one now-defunct Fortune 500 company I worked for, they were sort of reluctant to apply any informal techniques like watching users try to use software (without instructions or coaching), because they had a nascent Human Factors group that wanted to build a facility with one-way mirrors and video cameras, and they kept telling everyone that you needed to have a facility like that in order to learn anything.
On numerous occasions at numerous companies I've simply corralled someone, anyone, who had not yet used the software, and asked them to try to accomplish basic tasks with it. "Please forgive me for not helping, I just want to see how far you can get without help. I'll help you if you really get stuck." And then I've watched them as they tried to use my software.
I always learned a lot from this, and I learned it very quickly, and a lot of what I learned was really trivially easy to implement. You can so easily miss the blindingly obvious when you are familiar with the software yourself.
The worst advice--well, maybe not the worst, but bad advice--tended to come from people giving advice that they imagined was on someone else's behalf. You really do NOT know what things people are going to find easy or difficult until you actually watch them try.
Vanguely reminiscent of Titanic's "watertight" compartments, which were watertight at the SIDES, but open at the TOP. I believe it was "unsinkable" in some technical understanding of the word. That is, a localized hull breach that filled only one compartment would not have sunk the ship. But water could spill from one compartment to another when the ship was tilted, and thus the entry of water was not confined to the compartments where the leak was. Or something like that...
And whose fault would that be, exactly? For five months, Surface MEANT "Surface RT." Did someone hold a gun to Microsoft's head and say "Release Surface RT first?" Did someone hold a gun to Microsoft's head and say "Do Surface RT in the first place?"
Remember that portability was supposed to be one of the primary design goals for Windows NT, and it originally ran on, IIRC, Digital Alpha, IBM PowerPC, SPARC promised (but never delivered), etc. etc. If they'd stuck to their design goals, every Windows application could have been offered for Windows RT. Did someone hold a gun to their head and say "Forget portability, break your promises, ditch every platform but Intel?"
And then, having deliberately burned their bridges to everything but Intel, did someone hold a gun to their heads and say "Now release a product that isn't viable now that those bridges are burned?"
The yellow color was intended to evoke Mongolia--racism in the most literal sense--because Mongolia was the site then famous as the site where a lode of the highest-quality graphite had been discovered.
So yellow pencils could not have been patented--I hope--but whoever made them first might very well have had a legitimate claim to trademark protection as "trade dress."
...because of surface-to-volume and scaling considerations, the smaller these things get, the less fragile they get. I dropped my iPod Mini (rotating drive) at least as often as I dropped my current flash-memory iPod and never had a problem. Yes, battery life is an issue. Quite possibly, service life might be an issue (bearing wear).
Seagate is claiming 400 Gs maximum operating shock. I, um, gee, well truthfully I have no idea what that means in practical terms but it seems like a big number to me. They are claiming 80 Gs for the first desktop drive I looked at.
Amusing, of course, but irrelevant, because DRM isn't about piracy, and it certainly isn't about rewarding content creators, it's about preventing competition.
As long as you can't read an Amazon Kindle on a Nook, DRM is doing its job. If Nooks and Barnes and Noble are getting driven out of business, DRM is doing its job well.
An automated eBook scanner doesn't do anything to make the eBook business more competitive.
It all may be so, but nevertheless Google is an awful lot closer to Isaac Asimov's Multivac than I ever expected to see in my lifetime.
In the 1960s, when I would tell people that I was working with computers, a very common response is "What does that mean? Do you ask it questions?" At the time, I always thought it was a laughably naÃve question.
Google DOESN'T understand English, and that it takes a lot of lateral-thinking and adventure-game knowhow to formulate a question well. (For example: if you want the text of a poem or a song lyric, don't search on the title or the first line, search on the most obscure line or phrase from the poem you can think of because that's what's most likely to get you the full text).
Nevertheless, I just used Google to find me the ext of Isaac Asimov's The FInal Question.
After saying how much they respected and admired the Globe, the New York Times made it clear that they regarded Boston as the sticks and just wanted to milk the cash cow.
I was a subscriber for decades and might still be if they had basically not driven me away.
They gradually cut out all my favorite columnists and started to use wire services for national stories they would once have covered themselves.
Royal Ford, their auto writer, always talked about things like how the tested car did during a snowy ski trip to New Hampshire. So one day I open the paper to find that he's been replaced by a syndicated column written by someone in California.
The last straw was billing. They screwed up the billing. We were on quarterly billing, and when the New York Times took over, we continued to receive quarterly bills--but EVERY bill we got was accompanied with a 90-day late notice and threats to send it to collection.
We got that straightened out--went to automatic monthly payments by credit card--and THEN someone at the Globe decided it would be cool to wrap all of their newspaper bundles in computer printouts of customer credit card information.
My wife says to me, "Well, I hate the work of mailing a check every month, but should we do that?" And I say "Honey, didn't you read the rest of the story? They wrapped the Globe in credit card printouts, but they were wrapping the Worcester Telegram in customer checking account information printouts!
What can you say to a company that does a thing like that? Except "goodbye."
...due to screen sizing problems. The typical problem is that the font size and touch-sensitive areas are far too small, and don't respond to the "pinch" gesture.
In almost ALL applications, text entry of more than a word or phrase is close to unusable the text-selection cursors are too small to manipulate accurately; if you don't type it perfectly the first time, seeing and backspacing every error as you type it, your ability to make a correction in the middle of a block of text is close to nil.
If you read app reviews, you'll see that maybe 1/4 of all hidden-picture-adventure type games will be reported as unusable because something about the fit of the game to the physical screen ends up a required object, needed for future progress, unselectable.
So maybe the Android environment has solutions to all such problems, but on the evidence of actual applications, a LOT of developers either don't know the solutions or don't care about the user experience.
PBS at least shows that they care about the user experience.
When I think of Santa Cruz, all I can think of is SCO (Santa Cruz Operation). My mental picture of Santa Cruz is one of suits bringing lawsuits.
No, the outrage is about what they were hired to do. Things can be legal, yet objectionable or unethical or deceptive. Talking on a cell phone in movie theatres, or paying for one newspaper in a vending box but taking five, or farting in church--are all legal as far as I know, but they are all objectionable. If someone paid people to do it, it would not be come less objectionable merely because they were being paid.
Nutritious Hostess cupcake?
Luxurious Toyota Prius?
Tasteful Miley Cyrus wardrobe?
"Hollywood USED to be about making the best ART. Now, with the MBA's, it is about making short-term profit." I looked carefully to see whether you were being ironic... I don't know quite what to say! Despite "Ars Gratia Artis" on the ribbon around MGM's Leo, Hollywood has always been venal. Don't you know WHY the movie industry is centered in Hollywood?
Originally it was in New Jersey, and the Westerns, popular even then, were filmed in the Palisades. The problem was, the patent on the "Latham loop," that little loop of film that acts as a buffer between the continuously-turning reels and the intermittent claw, and a number of related patents, had been bought up by a cartel that charged fabulous amounts for properly license motion picture cameras. Many movie producers who were using unlicensed cameras fled West to be out of reach of the patent cartel's lawyers and process servers. Nothing about art there--it was all technology, intellectual property, and slightly illegal business dealings.
Then there were the years of the studio system and all sorts of complicated business linkages. The phrases "A picture and B picture" came from the studios' forcing theatres to buy pictures in bundles and pay for a lousy B picture in order to get the A pictures.
Hollywood cranked out tons and tons and tons of the most terrible schlock. Movies like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" are hommages to the Hollywood serial, but in college as a lark they showed actual serial episodes along with the movie series and they were unimaginably bad. Vast quantities of screen time were used up with non-action action, like cars slowly driving up to houses and parking and opening the car doors and getting out and walking up the walk...
Schlocky free TV killed off some of the market for schlocky movies. During the 1960s and 1970s there was a brief, slight elevation of the quality of movies with the breakup of the studio system and the rise of independent producers. But don't kid yourself. Rock Hudson trying to seduce Doris Day was not Great Art.
In 1967, following the success of "Mary Poppins," Roy Disney said that the Disney studio ought to have "at least one 'Mary Poppins' every year."
There's nothing new about the money people wishing there was a simple formula that they could get rid of all the pesky issues of creativity, talent, and the public's taste.
EPCOT stands for "Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow." It was supposed to be a town, not a theme park. Funny how these things go.
Any assertions that so-and-so "has been nominated for a Nobel prize" are unverifiable. Anyone can claim to have nominated anyone, but there's not way to know if they're telling the truth, because nominations can be made only by nominators invited by the Nobel committee, and the identity of the nominators and their nominations are kept secret for fifty years. See Nomination FAQ:
"Q: Has X been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize?
A: Information about the nominations, investigations, and opinions concerning the award is kept secret for fifty years.
Q: What about the rumours circling around the world about certain people being nominated for the Nobel Prize this year?
A: Well, either it's just a rumour, or someone among the invited nominators has leaked information. Since the nominations are kept secret for 50 years, you'll have to wait until then to find out."
If he didn't try it, but relied on underlings telling him that it was good, then shame on him.
If he tried it, realized how bad it was, but let it go out anyway because usability was less important than some other agenda--forcing developers into writing apps that would work on Windows Phone 8, maybe--then shame on him.
If he tried it and he thought it was good, then shame on him.
Tell me about it. I have been trying fruitlessly for over ten years to find someone capable of giving me permission to post a chapter of a 1955 novel, The Gadget Maker, by one Maxwell Griffith. It has not been reprinted since a 1956 paperback. It very obviously has no commercial value left in it. But if you happen to be an MIT alumnus, you would be fascinated to read the chapter describing the protagonist's years at MIT during the 1940s. It's a wonderful picture of a milieu--and it's not as if there were all that many novels set on the MIT campus! (The protagonist applies for admission to the aeronautical engineering program, interviews with the department head, expecting to be asked why he loves aeronautics--and finds that the department head's only real concern is to make sure that he isn't Jewish).
It's under copyright. The copyright was properly renewed in 1982. It has been a long, difficult journey--publishers basically do not take any responsibility for anything about old books, and the novel was published by Lippincott, which was taken over by medical-book publisher William & Wilkins, which acquired all Lippincott's medical books claims to have no records of Lippincott's fiction. No record at the Author's Guild, no leads through the MIT Alumni Association. Where the story stands at the moment is that I put up a sort of shout-out on my website, and Maxwell Griffith's son contacted me--and said he thought it was OK but that he needed to check with his two sisters. That was over a year ago and I've heard nothing... I've just emailed him again and perhaps there will finally be a resolution.
It's a perfect example of a cultural loss. There are thousands of books out there that are of intense interest to a few hundred people, or more, that under the old copyright laws would have been long out of copyright, but now are locked up--and you cannot find the person with the key. Thousands of books of cultural but no commercial value are being sacrificed in order to protect a tiny handful that are still worth big money.
When I was at MIT in the sixties, all undergraduates were required to take four semesters of "Humanities," in which we read chunks of Plato, the Bible, St. Augustine, Shakespeare (King Lear, I remember) and I-forget-what-all. The current requirements actually are eight semesters properly distributed in "HASS," Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and perhaps some current student will be able to say more about what that amounts to.
It wasn't a waste of time but I've never been really sure about the whole Great Books, "core" curriculum, Western canon thing. I think I learned much more about having a skeptical attitude from my science and engineering profs and from my fellow students than I did from my humanities courses. Science as taught at MIT then was not at all an authoritarian dispensation of knowledge.
The doctrine of the permanent value of certain "Great" works is sometimes called "educational perennialism," and reaches a high degree of development at St. John's College, Annapolis, where all subjects, including the sciences, are taught directly from original source texts. By all accounts it turns out well-qualified students although I'm not sure how many of them go on to engineering careers.
There is a certain arbitrary character to it. It took me a long time to figure out what the big deal about Latin and Greek was. In high school I took Latin and my understanding was that learning Latin would teach logical thought, and put me into contact with "great" works. Gradually I figured out that the reason why public high schools have Latin was that they were imitating prep schools; prep schools taught Latin because it was once an admissions requirement to Harvard; Harvard required Latin because it was imitating Oxford; Oxford required Latin because it had historic ties to the Church of England, and the Church of England was an offshoot of the Catholic-in-the-large sense church, which in turn spoke Latin (in the West) and Greek (in the East). There was also, I guess, some authentic personal enthusiasm on the part of some well-educated Brits in the 1800s for the "classics," i.e. they got a kick out of reading Horace's take on things, but I think it was mostly a cultural and historic heritage from the Church.
How many Victorian-era colleges taught Arabic so that students would be able to read al-KhwÄrizmÄ in the original, I wonder?
If you want to get technical: the language was MACRO-11. Which is an example of an assembly language. I program in "C#", not in "compiler."
In the Digital world, the name "MACRO" stuck because there were very early assemblers for the PDP-1 that did not have macro capability. So "MACRO" was the name for the assembler that did. In subsequent machine generations, "the" assembler was usually called MACRO even though as far as I know there weren't any assemblers without macro capabilities.
And perhaps I should add: the reason that it's called assembly language is because of drum memory. The usage dates back AT LEAST to the IBM 650 and Symbolic Optimal Assembly Language (SOAP). "Assembly" was short for "optimal assembly." Each instruction contained within it the address of the next instruction--they weren't sequential--and "optimal assembly" was the process of calculating how long each instruction would take so that the next instruction could be placed at the right location on the drum that it would be almost under the head when the last instruction had completed. "Optimal assembly" was the memory placement aspect of it.
The symbolic optimal assembly program added to that the advanced capability of allowing programmers to refer to instruction codes by convenient, easy-to-remember mnemonics like UFA and STA, as well as the capability of giving your very own names to instruction locations.
For some reason, the category name got abbreviated to "assembler" rather than "symbol-" um... symbolizer? Symbolic? OK, maybe THAT reason... and it stuck, even after advanced computers like the IBM 704 started to have random-access memory.
...violate the laws of physics, too. Because that's really all that this is: a form of leverage that multiplies speed while decreasing force.